1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a character recognition system. More specifically, the present invention relates to a character recognition system receiving hand written characters as inputs, recognizing the character data thereof and outputting the result of recognition.
2. Description of the Background Art
FIG. 10 is a schematic block diagram of a conventional character recognition system. Referring to FIG. 10, input means 1 receives a hand written character as an input and turns it into electronic data. The input character data is applied to recognizing means 2. Recognizing means 2 has necessary information for recognition, and recognizes the character data supplied from input means 1. Results and states of input means 1 and recognizing means 2 are applied to output means 3 which display necessary information.
When hand written characters are to be recognized by the conventional character recognition system shown in FIG. 10, it is difficult to obtain high ratio of recognition, since hand written characters generally have much variations and omissions. Accordingly, in the conventional character recognition system, the method of recognition itself has been improved by developing a dictionary for recognition of characters which are likely to have recognition errors. In order to attain higher ratio of recognition, it is necessary to correct the result of recognition by using means other than those providing such result of recognition.
One representative method is correction of the obtained result of recognition by confirming grammatical meaning by using grammatical knowledge. In this method, correct word sets are identified by using grammatical knowledge based on a dictionary related to grammar. More specifically, a plurality of candidates for characters obtained as a result of recognition are combined appropriately and a combination of characters having proper grammatical meaning is found as a unit of an idiom or a phrase.
However, a large number of character combinations must be studied by using enormous knowledge related to grammar in order to obtain a combination having proper grammatical meaning. Meanwhile, the obtained candidates for characters are treated as equally weighted. Especially when hand written characters are recognized, the result of recognition is not very reliable. Therefore, even if first candidates for characters are given as a result of recognition, actually the reliability of recognition may possibly vary widely character by character. Accordingly, if the plurality of candidates for characters obtained as a result of recognition are simply combined one after another, a large number of combinations must be generated, taking a long period of time, in order to obtain a combination having a proper grammatical meaning.